Out of Place by Diane Lefer

Author:Diane Lefer [Lefer, Diane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781953236050
Publisher: Fomite

How Does It Feel to Be They?

“That’s what you are now,” said Chen. “The infamous They. Inspiring paranoia in the Left.”

Dawit had agreed to work with the FBI, but only if he would never have to carry a gun. He thought, I want to get through my life on earth without hurting anyone.

Chen was always talkative when working with someone new, a way to avoid talking about himself, something he found as uncomfortable as Dawit did. “And libertarians. They’re paranoid too. They are watching you. They will entrap you. They are part of the almighty evil Big Brother surveillance state.”

“I thought the terrorists were the They.”

“They will always be the hostile force without a name or a face,” Chen said. “But we have to see individuals. When you—we—investigate or interrogate, it’s always an individual human being. We go in knowing as much as it’s possible to know and then we elicit bits and pieces. It’s a mosaic, Tesfaye.”

Dawit Tesfaye preferred being called Dawit, pronounced Dah-Wheat. In the US, people always seemed to pronounce the W like a V, to make it sound like David. In high school he’d been Davy; in college, Dave.

Chen preferred to go by his last name. Given his slight stature, too many people over the years had persisted in calling him “Danny Boy,” a nickname that would only work, he believed, if you were Filipino. He was Chinese, sort of, born in Singapore when it was still part of Malaysia. Cantonese-speaking, if you consider that means understanding most of what your mother used to say to you as a little boy before the family began to communicate primarily and then exclusively in English.

What a Mutt and Jeff pair. Chen, short, slight—he looked like the scientist. Dawit was, at least, imposing in size but if he didn’t actually have an identifiable accent, there was something in his speech that hinted at foreign birth. If they hadn’t carried badges and ID, whoever would have taken them for FBI? They did wear suits and ties. In some ways the Bureau hadn’t changed since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, though with agents like Dawit and Chen—and Dawit was actually a specialist, not an agent—the FBI had become an exemplary model of diversity.

“Now they—we—talk about a failure to connect the dots,” said Chen. “That’s not how I look at it. The dots just give you an outline. We need the whole picture. A mosaic. You don’t see at first how things relate. Nothing comes to you in chronological order. But discard nothing. Better yet, instead of a mosaic, think jigsaw puzzle. Look at the big picture, as much of it as you’ve got. Your eyes scan the board. You pick up the new bit of intelligence and you ask, Is this part of the design? And if so, you have to ask where does it fit? Or what I prefer to do, I start putting it together by looking at the piece that looks out of place. That doesn’t fit.”

I’ve always been that piece, thought Dawit.

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